Saturday, November 8, 2003

Last weekend I decided that if I was going to try to write for the broadsheets, it would probably do me good to actually read them once in a while. So, in a fit of enthusiasm, I went out and bought all the Friday, Saturday and Sunday broadsheets.

That is one hefty heap of papers, I can tell you.

I’d meant to read one set of papers a day, but so far I’ve only managed to scratch the surface of The Guardian, going through the features one by one, counting words, trying to get a feel for their style.

The rest are sitting there, as I type, lurking at me.

It’s kinda strange U-turn for me really – I’ve had an aversion to newspapers for years. I used to buy The Guardian because it had the best media jobs section, but I gave that up a long time ago when I gave up trying to get jobs in the media. Now I’m planing on trying to write for them, I guess I better start reading them.

I have to say that so far, I’ve actually enjoyed the experience. Maybe I’ve changed since those days of trying desperately to get into publishing, maybe I’ve got more interest in the wider world. In fact, certainly I have. I see much more relevance in events outside of my sphere of experience than I used to.

Not that I was closed-minded, I was just short of patience. I wanted to know what was going on that affected me directly and wasn’t overly concerned with anything else. Now I see that the tendrils of cause and effect reach much further than one might expect – because of the internet I now have contacts all over the world and who knows what might happen that would affect my far-away friends?

Tomorrow I will try to finish off at least one portion of the heap. Then I think it will be a case of trying to read newspapers instead of blogs each morning for a few days to finish the rest off.

Hm, am I actually capable of giving up on some of my daily blog reads? Difficult. Very difficult.

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